Wireless communication devices are incredibly widespread in today's society. For example, people use mobile devices such as cellular phones, smart phones, personal digital assistants, laptop computers, pagers, tablet computers, etc. to send and receive data wirelessly from countless locations. Moreover, advancements in wireless communication technology have greatly increased the versatility of today's wireless communication devices, enabling users to perform a wide range of tasks from a single, portable device that conventionally required either multiple devices or larger, non-portable equipment.
The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is a widely deployed and utilized protocol for communicating via the Internet. As specified by TCP, communicating devices are configured to provide positive acknowledgement of received data segments. If segment(s) are not acknowledged in a timely fashion, the sender retransmits the non-acknowledged segment(s). This retransmission is governed by a time interval referred to as the retransmit timeout (RTO).
Conventionally, RTO utilizes an exponential “back-off” mechanism on successive retransmits, such that RTO exponentially increases with each such retransmit. However, this RTO backoff mechanism can adversely impact the connectivity of mobile devices. For instance, a mobile device can encounter bursty connectivity patterns, e.g., when moving between areas of high connectivity and areas of low connectivity, or the like. In such a scenario, exponential RTO backoff can cause substantial delay in reestablishing communication upon entry into an area of high connectivity. Further, if the RTO has backed off to a sufficiently high value, a mobile device transiting between areas of high and low connectivity may fail entirely to reestablish communication within a given high-communication area.